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Liz Moor. Communication and Economic Life
Table of Contents
Guide
Pages
Dedication
Communication and Economic Life
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The economy and ‘economic life’
Communication, media and economic life
Value plurality in economic life
Structure of the book
Notes
Part I Economic action is communicative
Chapter 1 Does homo economicus talk? Communication in economic theory
Economic action is a form of communication
Communication is information plus signalling
Communication is the strategic use of information: game theory
Recent developments: a new role for communication?
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 2 The symbolism of money, payment and price
Money’s symbolic qualities
Psychoanalysis and money symbolism
The symbolic function of payments
The meaning of price
Changing meanings of money, payment and price
Conclusion
Notes
Part II Communication constructs economic life
Chapter 3 Promotion
The rhetoric of the economic system
The world of work: promotion and self-promotion
Consumption and delinguistified communication
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4 Information
New volumes of information
New forms of exchange and new economic models
Software, algorithms and proprietary data
Marketing discrimination
Price personalization
Conclusion
Chapter 5 Narrative
Narratives, stories and why they matter
Literary fiction and the repudiation of the market
Filmic and televisual narratives about money
The fact/fiction continuum in economic writing
The economy as a narrated phenomenon
The challenge to narrative
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 6 Discussion
Mediated discussion about economic life
Audience discussion shows
Online discussion
Everyday discussion of economic issues
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Reframing communication in economic life
What should economic communication be like?
Notes
References
Index
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For Max and Ezra
Friends and colleagues who read parts of the text include Clea Bourne, Beckie Coleman, David Moats and Dave O’Brien. I would like to thank them for their frank and constructive feedback. The remaining errors and omissions are my own.
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In practice, focusing on ‘economic communication’ or ‘communication in economic life’ means drawing multiple traditions of work into the same orbit. Work on the way that, for example, financial crises or industrial disputes are represented in ‘the media’ (whether that is news and current affairs, or Hollywood films) must sit alongside work considering how ordinary people discuss debt and savings on internet discussion boards, or how they use savings apps on their phones, but also how their views of capitalism might be formed through reading particular kinds of novels or playing particular kinds of computer games. These are all forms of economic communication, and one is not more ‘authentically’ economic because it deals with inflation or central bank lending. Within such a framing, mediation would be posed as both a question and a spectrum. It has to be a question, rather than something we assume, because not all forms of economic communication are mediated, and certainly not through ‘mass’ media. As we shall see in chapter 6, the ordinary face-to-face discussions people have about the economy are vital for understanding how people make their own process of provisioning subjectively meaningful, and one of the advantages of attending to them is that they often show how far ordinary understandings of ‘the economy’ converge with or diverge from accounts offered by either governments or news media. On the other hand, mediation is also a spectrum because as we see in chapters 5 and 6, the ‘mediated’ versions of these conversations (for example as they take place on internet discussion forums) may share a good deal of the substance of their face-to-face counterparts. Where they differ is that mediated discourse extends the availability of these discussions in time and space, and offers a wider range of interlocutors (and perhaps of viewpoints) than are typically available in everyday life. Studying them alongside each other thus allows us to draw certain conclusions about how much difference mediation makes.
The approach to mediation in the chapters that follow draws on two traditions. The first is the expanded sense of media as including materials, technologies and systems. In this view, communicative forms such as novels, paintings and graffiti might be considered as mediators, because they play a role in shaping how we think about things (they ‘get in between’ us and some more direct view of a topic or event). But they are also mediated in the sense that their communication occurs via materials that place certain limits on them. In fact, all kinds of phenomena can perform a ‘mediating’ function: trains, radio signals and cloud storage can link people together, and have the potential to enable (but also place limits on) actions that are communicative (Innis 1950; Peters 2015). German sociologists Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann both include ‘money’ and ‘power’ in their definitions of communications media, and Luhmann even includes ‘scientific knowledge, art, love, [and] morals’ (Fuchs 2011: 90). These are beyond my scope here, but I do take this view of media as materials and systems seriously, particularly in chapter 2, where I look at the symbolic dimensions of money and payments media, and in chapter 3, where I explore the significance of ‘delinguistified’ and ambient forms of promotion.
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